La Serenissima

Adrian Chandler and La Serenissima, with virtuoso soloists soprano Mhairi Lawson, trumpeter Simon Munday and bassoonist Peter Whelan, transport you back to the heyday of the Venetian Republic with music from grand opera, serenatas, concertos, sinfonias, motets and gondoliers’ ballads, including several world premiere recordings.

Adrian Chandler’s and La Serenissima’s 10th release for Avie – coinciding with the label’s 10th Anniversary – has all the hallmarks that have made the Vivaldi specialists one of the best-selling and acclaimed period-instrument bands performing today. Adrian’s erudition and his ensemble’s crowd-pleasing performances combine to produce recordings that are at once popular and enlightening. Venice by Night evokes an era of the Venetian Republic when the arts flourished, attracting audiences from all over Europe including scores of royalty. Feeding the tourist trade, the resident composers revelled in creating everything from grand operas and serenatas, virtuoso concertos and sinfonias, motets and gondoliers’ ballads. As with the chart-topping Vivaldi: The French Connection 2 (AV2218) which featured the world-premiere recording of the flute concerto Il Gran Mogol, Adrian has once again unearthed numerous works from this period that are recorded for the first time.

Adrian Chandler and La Serenissima, winners of 2010’s Gramophone Award in the Baroque Instrumental category for Vivaldi: The French Connection (AV2178), present the sequel, The French Connection 2, which features the world-premiere recording of Il Gran mogul, the lost Vivaldi Flute Concerto recently rediscovered in the National Archives of Scotland.

Unearthing of the score – which has been authenticated by the world’s leading Vivaldi scholars – made international, mainstream news and this first recording, by today’s leading exponents of the music of Vivaldi, is eagerly anticipated. The album contains nine concertos in all, including another premiere of a recently discovered Violin Concerto.

The French Connection enjoyed success on both sides of the pond, with a Top 3 Billboard Classical Chart position and nationwide airplay in the US as well as the UK.

After the extremely successful and acclaimed series ‘The Rise of the North Italian Violin Concerto’ Adrian Chandler and La Serenissima return to AVIE to explore another side of Vivaldi’s compositions : The French Connection.

“The voracity with which the French devoured Italian music during the late baroque period is well documented. Vivaldi was involved in both the dissemination of the French style in Italy and that of the Italian style in France. His works achieved fashionable status there in the late 1720s thanks to his concertos Le Quattro Stagioni which became a feature at the popular Concert Spirituel (between 1728 and 1763).” Adrian Chandler

Adrian Chandler and La Serenissima, with virtuoso soloist mezzo-soprano Sally Bruce-Payne, continue their enlightening exploration of the music of Vivaldi focusing on two contrasting eras of the composer’s Venetian operatic career. Vivaldi specialists Adrian Chandler’s and La Serenissima’s hallmark qualities of erudition combined with crowd-pleasing performances have made them one of the best-selling and acclaimed period-instrument bands performing today. Recently their Gramophone Award winning album Vivaldi: The French Connection (AV2178) topped a Forbes list of How to Build a Top Quality Classical Music Library. Their last release, Venice by Night (AV2257) made the Top Ten of the UK Specialist Classical Chart. Their 11th release for Avie, Vivaldi: A Tale of Two Seasons once again presents the Red Priest in an engaging and fascinating light. Focusing on two Venetian operatic seasons of 1717 and 1733, the enlightening program juxtaposes the work of an eager young man with that of an older, more cunning composer who had adapted his music to that of the fashionable Neapolitan style.

The playing of Adrian Chandler and his crack period-instrument band La Serenissima emulates the title of their eighth release for Avie, mining the treasures of Vivaldi’s vast output.

Who are these Gods, Emperors and Angels in the title of the latest virtuoso vehicle for Adrian Chandler and his dazzling period-instrument band La Serenissima? Vivaldi was connected to many Highnesses on the European continent, foremost among them the widely cultured Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV to whom Vivaldi dedicated his set of concertos titled La Cetra, meaning “The Lyre,” hence likening the emperor to the lyre playing god Apollo. The theme continues with the oddly titled Concerto Conca or “Conch Concerto,” alluding to the use of the conch shell as a musical trumpet, heard in the work’s first movement, and as used by Triton, son of Neptune and Amphitrite, and by Neptune’s attendants. The Angels are undoubtedly Vivaldi’s virtuoso female students at the Ospedale della Pietà, one of which was described in a contemporary anonymous poem: “She plays the violin in such a way / that anyone hearing her is transported to Paradise / if indeed it is true that up there / the angels play like that.”

Chandler and his forces, delivering their eighth imaginative album for Avie, play like gods, emperors and angels indeed, further securing their exalted place in the realms of early music performance.

This is the debut recording by the young English violinist Adrian Chandler, whose passion for Vivaldi led to his exploration of several of the Red Priest’s contemporaries, including Albinoni, and the younger, dazzling German violinist and composer Johann Georg Pisendel. Pisendel met Vivaldi and Albinoni in Venice while touring as a member of the Dresden court orchestra. His technical wizardry so impressed the two older masters that they immediately penned some of their most virtuosic violin sonatas for him. Adrian Chandler and his ensemble La Serenissima present two works each by the Venetians, which sit alongside Pisendel’s own for a revelatory feast of Baroque fireworks. Remarkably, the works by Pisendel and Albinoni have not appeared before on CD.

Pastoral tableau and earthly delights are on display in this vibrant and varied selection of Vivaldi’s arias and concertos for mixed forces. Vivaldi in Arcadia, the follow-up recording to Adrian Chandler’s Avie debut, Per Monsieur Pisendel (AV 0018), features the expanded forces of his ensemble La Serenissima, with the stunning string soloists engaging in a contest of style and beauty. The sparkling soprano of Mhairi Lawson, a member of English National Opera, joins them for arias from Dorilla in Tempe.

Adrian Chandler’s passionate explorations of Vivaldi’s music have led to numerous critically acclaimed performances, including the UK premieres of several of the Red Priest’s stage works.

Born on Merseyside in 1974, Adrian Chandler studied both modern and Baroque violin at the Royal College of Music with Rodney Friend and Catherine Mackintosh. Whilst still a student at the RCM he founded the period ensemble La Serenissima with whom he has since performed numerous solo recitals and Vivaldi concerti in major festivals around the world.

His most recent CD releases feature virtuoso sonatas by Albinoni, Pisendel and Vivaldi (AV0018), Vivaldi Concerti and Arias (AV0031), religious concerti by Vivaldi (AV2063), the first two of three award-winning records (AV 2106 & 2128) charting the development of the North Italian Violin Concerto (NIVC) and Vivaldi cantatas and sonatas (Linn CKD 281). His performances have also been broadcast by BBC Radio 3, Radio Scotland, Dutch Radio, Radio 3 Belgium, Radio France, Danish Radio, Classic FM and Japanese TV. Adrian was awarded a three year AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) fellowship at Southampton University in order to research the development of the North Italian violin concerto between 1690 and 1740. The culmination of this project is the release of this CD, the third of the North Italian Violin Concerto series.

Antonio Vivaldi was famously both a virtuoso performer and an impresario. The same can be said of Adrian Chandler, whose passionate advocacy has associated him with the Red Priest’s music like no other. Following last autumn’s release of The Rise of the North Italian Violin Concerto 1690–1740, Volume One: The Dawn of the Virtuoso (AV 2106), which earned Chandler and his ensemble La Serenissima an Editor’s Choice from Gramophone magazine, Avie offers the second in a three-volume series exploring the development of the violin and growing demand for virtuoso repertoire during the Italian baroque era, of which Vivaldi was undisputedly the zenith. Mirroring the highly successful format of Volume One, Chandler intersperses dazzling concerti with contemporaneous vocal works, illuminating these genres’ effects on each other in Vivaldi’s oeuvre. If Chandler’s thorough research is a multi-faceted crystal, his performances are the rainbow-hued shaft of light brightly shining through.